Kramnik plays Werle & Sebag

This afternoon, at 14:00 CET, in Enschede, the Netherlands a special event takes place: in a simultaneous exhibition, former world champion Vladimir Kramnik plays IGM Jan Werle & WGM Marie Sebag. full story »

Order and chaos in chess

Is chess ultimately governed by fixed rules and logic, or is it just a ‘random’ game? A comparison with science.

by Arne full story »

Dutch chess player banned after using PocketFritz

Poll added, on the right, in the grey column.

Last Saturday, while playing a game for his club, a Dutch chess player got caught outside the playing hall, holding a PDA. On the screen, a chess position was visible. It appeared that the player had entered the actual position of the game into PocketFritz. His game was declared lost, and yesterday the player was punished severely by the competition manager of the Dutch Chess Federation: a ban till the end of the season 2009-2010. full story »

What a way to win

During during the World Championship in Mexico, the computer match Rybka-Zappa was played. In the fourth game something happened that made me lose interest in this match (and actually in computer-computer matches in general). In Chess Today issue 2530 (which came out last Friday) IM Andrey Deviatkin analysed some games of the Rybka-Zappa match and after reading this, I feel obliged to tell the “truthâ€? about game 4. full story »

Top computers will also meet

Just like the last Wch, during this Wch in Mexico City a computer match will be held, starting tomorrow. The strongest engines of the moment will meet: Rybka (who became computer world champion this summer) and Zappa (world champ in 2005 and vice champion in 2007). The match consists of 10 games, with a time control of 60 minutes plus 20 seconds per move. We have the (quite interesting) press conference already on video. full story »

Rybka’s Immortal Game (Part 2)

Today an article by a guest author: Jeroen Noomen, writer of the opening book of the computer world champion, Rybka.

Some time ago ChessVibes published the “immortal game” of the chess computer program Rybka, currently the strongest engine in the world. Although this game was quite beautiful, I think we have a new candidate that fits this description better. It was played in the WCCC (world computer chess championship) 2007 in Amsterdam. Rybka beat the dutch program Diep in an amazing game, full of spectacular tactics and difficult-to-find moves. After 29 moves the game was over, something that is very rare in computer games these days. Especially for ChessVibes I have analysed the new Rybka immortal game and a few other Rybka games from the WCCC. full story »

Turn off those opening libraries!

Today not only the finals of the Candidate matches in Elista have begun, but also the “Ultimate Computer Challenge” computer match between Deep Fritz and Deep Junior. Kirsan Ilyumzhinov, president of the FIDE, appears to sponor the match himself. Of course this is all very moving, but I suspect that Chessbase would otherwise have donated the money. By the way, neither Ilyumzhinov nor Chessbase have responded to Rybka’s challenge about which we wrote before. Whether this is really surprising, I leave to the reader’s imagination.
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Rybka: $100,000 challenge to FIDE

During the “tour”, I’m hardly able to keep up with the chess news myself, let alone write about it. But I can make some exceptions of course, for instance when I receive an open letter from Vasik Rajlich, the programmer of the strongest computer program in the world, Rybka. He’s offering a $100,000 challenge from Rybka to FIDE, who will be represented by the winner of the Ultimate Computer Chess Challenge 2007. “The challenge consists of a 24 game match, at classical time controls, on unlimited hardware and with unlimited opening books, held at 2 games per day over twelve days, with Rybka giving a handicap of one point plus draw.” To put it mildly, Rajlich is surprised about many aspects of the “Ultimate Computer Chess Challenge” between the programs Deep Junior and Deep Fritz, being held in Elista during the final phase of the current Candidates Matches. And he’s right of course; Fritz is not in the top 3 of computer programs anymore and Junior is to be found somewhere deep down in the top 10. Rybka is leading the computer rating lists by a huge margin for about 1,5 years now. It seems to me that with the challenge the Rybka team is (rightfully) trying to prove that the “The Ultimate Computer Chess Challenge”, between two Chessbase programs, is nothing more than a commercial spectacle and most importantly a farce. full story »

Review: ‘Secrets of Practical Chess’ (new edition)

During the last Corus tournament I received good news: a new edition of John Nunn’s classic Secrets of Practical Chess (1998) was forthcoming. In those days (1998) I was working for Chess and Goshop Het Paard in Amsterdam, and I often had to advise chess players which books to buy. I have often recommended Nunn’s book to chess players of my own level (at the time I had a national rating of around 2100) and slightly below. full story »

The grandmaster is to move

The attentive daily newspaper readers won’t have missed it: a citizens riot in Russia, and all this led by ex-chess player Garry Kasparov. Chessvibes brings you – in cooperation with Olaf Koens of the Dutch quality blog Sargasso – a piece of background. Who is Garry Kasparov, and what does he want?

In December I (Olaf) wrote before about the opposition in Russia, a richly coloured collection of all, left-wing and right-wing, who are against Putin. The march in Moscow was clearly not a success, and even in Saint Petersburg – a city that has seen a revolution before – nobody had great expectations. Luckily, the opposite appeared to be true. More than 5,000 people stood up against the broadly shouldered power. Read here the stories of the printed Dutch press that perched down in ‘Piter’ by train.

How strong was Garry Kasparov as a chess player? The answer is quite simple: the best, ever. Because that’s what the experts agree on. Here a short biography, followed by an analysis of his recent speech in New York. full story »

‘Cheating Topalov recorded’

For quite a while now, in the chess world there is a big fuzz about alleged cheating by the world’s highest rated player Veselin Topalov from Bulgaria. Rumours that started after his huge success at the Wch in San Luis (Argentina), at the end of 2005, that were intensified by the article by Martin Breutigam in the Süddeutsche Zeitung. The Russian newspaper Kommersant now claims to have in their possession a video made by a Dutch chess fan, who claims to have put on tape suspicious gestures of Topalov’s manager, Silvio Danailov. Just for the record: it wasn’t Chessvibes! full story »

Interview with Anatoly Karpov

There it is. The Big Chessvibes Interview with Anatoly Karpov. Wednesday morning I spoke to him about half an hour in The Hague, where he was to play a simul later that day against members of the Dutch parliament. (By the way, the score was 21 wins and 2 draws for the ex-world champion). The questions I asked him, were put forward in advance by you, the visitors, on the Chessvibes website. (Because we were limited by the clock, not all questions could be asked.) This way I think we managed to make it an interview with a nice mix of subjects that are interesting for a broad audience. Enjoy! full story »

Fritz, Rybka, or think for yourself after all?

In the glorious past grandmaster games still had something invincible, something you would look at with respect and would not dare giving your opinion about. Grandmaster games were something very complicated, something you should not show to beginners, since it would only confuse them. Since the rise of the computer, databases and engines, that is all gone. You can check in the database up to which point it was still theory and from that point on you can judge the players’ performance with any engine. The audience at home knows exactly what is happening from move to move and top players are complaining about the decline of respect. full story »

Great little moves from Paderborn

At the end of December 2006, the 16th International Paderborn Computer Chess Championship was held. The tournament was played in the beautiful Heinz Nixdorf Museum in Paderborn and Rybka won with 6,5 out of 7, after she only allowed a draw against the program Spike. Second was Shredder, who who all games except the loss against Rybka. Martin van Essen shows us some nice fragments from the tournament. full story »

Karsten Müller on the 1st match game Kramnik-Deep Fritz

During the Christmas celebration in our chessclub HSK I asked the well-known endgame expert & grandmaster Karsten Müller whether he would be interested to occasionally & spontaneously contribute to the interesting project Doggers-schaak (about which he had read in one of the German chess magazines!). Müller is the author of Fundamental Chess Endings and Secrets of Pawn Endings (both together with Frank Lamprecht). Below you find his first contribution: how Kramnik could have beaten Deep Fritz in their first match game. full story »

Rybka’s immortal game

Kramnik’s 4-2 loss of last week against the computer program Deep Fritz was a big blow. Not as big of course as Kasparov’s defeat in 1997 against Deep Blue, which is universally considered as the end of the human supremacy over chess engines, but the international media did mention it, for example the BBC and CBS. The news even inspired a computer programmer to try and make a program that will be the best in the poker world as well! Especially for the company Chessbase the victory of their darling pet Fritz was nice of course, and they did not dread in calling it the world’s leading chess computer program, already during the match. However, Deep Fritz is not the best. Not at all. full story »

In Memoriam: David Ionovich Bronstein

“For the sake of brilliance it is worth taking a risk!” That is how Bronstein played, even in his advanced years. After Tarrasch and Nimzowitsch he is perhaps the most outstanding populariser of the game, a genuine teacher of the chess world.â€? – Gary Kasparov

David Bronstein was both an outstanding chess player and an excellent writer. Furthermore he was one of the most beautiful players of the twentieth century, always looking for the beauty in chess. Where Botwinnik saw chess as science, Bronstein considered it to be art. And of course it was Bronstein who wrote one of the true classics in chess literature: Zurich International Chess Tournament 1953. Enough reasons to pay tribute to David Ionovich Bronstein. full story »

The game of chess as the universe

Every chess player knows the comparisons between the game of chess and war, between the game of chess and ‘life’. But computers show that the game of chess should actually not be compared to real life combat or life itself, but rather to… the universe. full story »

Deep Fritz drawing and cruising to victory

There’s a big chance the match Kramnik-Deep Fritz will be decided by the world champion’s Blunder. After two draws there’s only one game with Black left for Kramnik to level the score. full story »

Thoughts about an unequal battle

A question that is not heard enough these days, is: should we actually be glad with all these matches between Man and Machine? Of course there are many perspectives from which you can try to answer this question. full story »

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